The demand for quicker and more efficient processing capabilities continues to increase in today's business environments. As such, computing system designs have evolved to address these demands. In one aspect, operating system platforms are constantly being redesigned to help manage the access to data and devices leveraged by host computing systems. Typical operating system platforms perform many basic tasks, such as processing input data, providing output data, managing files and directories stored in memory, and controlling peripheral devices, such as printers, disk drives, sockets, etc. Computing systems that leverage multiple processors to perform many tasks may employ operating systems that perform multi-user, multiprocessing, multitasking, and/or multithreading operations that enable multiple users, programs, or threads to access data and devices concurrently.
One type of multiprocessing operating system is Unix. Like most operating systems, Unix orchestrates various components of a host computing system, such as processors, memory, disk drives, input and output devices, etc. Additionally, Unix provides systems with multi-user and multitasking capabilities that offer efficient access to data and devices. The core of the Unix operating system is the kernel. This component is software that controls allocation of resources during runtime of a host computing system. It tracks the availability of resources and provides communication functions to enable multiple programs to communicate with these resources. Because today's markets demand more efficient processing capabilities, Unix and other similar multiprocessing operating systems are popular choices for resource provision system environments.
Some computing systems that provide resource sharing through its operating system platform may do so using a file system that defines devices as files. Processes executing in the computing system may access these files using descriptors that point to particular devices through the file system. Although such arrangements allow for multiple processes to have access to the same file (e.g., device), problems may arise when these processes must share information associated with a common device. For instance, consider a situation where a first process uses a file descriptor to access a first device within a computing system environment. While accessing the first device, the device may recognize a particular state associated with the first process. Problems occur when the first process requires a second process to access the same device to perform a task in relation to the current state recognized by the device for the first process. When the second process accesses the first device, the device recognizes a different state for the second process. Accordingly, although both processes may access the same device, they are operating at different states in relation to that device. Such inconsistencies may result in incorrect operations being performed during runtime processing. Accordingly, there is a need for an operating system that overcomes these problems and provides consistent and efficient resource sharing in a multiprocessing computing environment.